Just before 11 p.m. on November 5, 2011, the biggest earthquake in Oklahoma’s history hit the small town of Prague. It buckled a highway, exploded windows, collapsed homes and left terrified residents clutching their beds as they waited for the shaking to stop. Ripples from the 5.7 magnitude quake were felt as far as 800 […]
Does oil and gas drilling cause earthquakes?
Posted inWotr
Eco-terrorism and me
It was not really surprising but, well, disappointing to hear that I’d been called an “eco-terrorist” by one of my neighbors. The news was second-hand, of course, which somehow made it worse. Whoever pronounced the judgment, whether she or he, hadn’t bothered to tell me about it, but let it slip, off-hand, as if it […]
Posted inGoat
On setting aside new national monuments
As of last week, our country has five new national monuments; two of them are in the West. The Eastern sites, controlled by the National Park Service, are cultural – new monuments in Ohio and Maryland commemorate Charles Young, the first African-American colonel in the Army, and Harriet Tubman, the most famous conductor on the […]
Posted inRange
Montana’s Rep. Steve Daines warms up to conservation
When the newly minted Congressman Steve Daines stepped into the press conference he wore cowboy boots, standard issue for Republican Congressmen from Big Sky Country. What set him apart were the words that came out of his mouth. Daines, a Bozeman businessman elected in November, held the conference to announce his support for the North […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: Feral child
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert, published the first Monday of each month. Almost ten years ago, after my wife Eryn’s difficult and dangerous 22-hour labor, our first daughter, Hannah Virginia, made her reluctant entrance and began an unbroken run […]
Posted inArticles
How fish consumption determines water quality
Jim Peters lives near Puget Sound in Washington, and during fishing season his kids eat smoked salmon like candy. Peters is a council member of the Squaxin Island Tribe of South Puget Sound. Fish permeate nearly every aspect of their culture; in the 1850s tribal members gave up most of their land to settlers in […]
Posted inRange
15 years of Mexican gray wolves: celebrate or sob?
Friday, March 29 will be the 15th anniversary of the day U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staffers braved a blizzard to release the first group of captive bred Mexican gray wolves – also called “lobos” – into the wild. The wolves had been waiting in pens in the Apache National Forest in Arizona, the first […]
Posted inGoat
Montana’s roadkill bill
I remember when a doe collided with my mom’s tank-like 1973 Chrysler Newport, an earwax gold car we eventually dubbed the “the deer slayer.” Mom trudged to a neighbor’s and called my dad, who came out to dispatch the unfortunate animal, and take it home to eat. It became a family joke to tease Dad […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2013: Second annual travel issue
Strolling San Francisco with a special guidebook to street trees
Note: This story is part of a special HCN magazine issue devoted to travel in the West. San Francisco, California Let’s say you’ve freed up a couple days and more than a couple bucks to visit San Francisco. Unlike the hordes of tourists who visit this city each year, you’d rather not spend your entire […]
Posted inGoat
Help the economy: Start a fire.
Now that wildfire season is (already) upon us, some old-timer will surely start reminiscing about the days when “work fires” were common; when, on hot summer days, locals set forest fires in the hope that they and their buddies would get jobs on the federally-funded fire crews. A few dozen acres of brush gone up […]
Posted inRange
A second century of greatness
Earlier this week President Obama used authority granted by the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate five new national monuments. Delaware earned its first national park unit, celebrating the state’s inaugural role in ratifying the U.S. Constitution. Maryland’s Underground Railroad National Monument pays tribute to famous conductor Harriet Tubman. Nature and culture are now protected […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Pot pilgrims
Traveling in the clouds “Marijuana tourists” are expected to converge on Colorado and Washington, hoping to score without fear of handcuffs, because voters in those states legalized recreational pot last November. Arthur Frommer, founder of the famous Frommer’s Travel Guides, observes that “already, hotels in Seattle and Denver are reporting numerous requests for reservations by […]
Posted inGoat
Snow not falling on cedars
I remember the moment when, drinking strong coffee under a tin roof pattering with the relentless southeast Alaska rain, I first cut yellow-cedar with a chisel. A clean curl of cream-colored, sharp-scented wood peeled from the big beam. My patient teacher, whose whole house was built from the stuff, just grinned through his bushy beard […]
Posted inWotr
Pop Quiz
True or False? Earth Day was created in 1970 to celebrate all the wonderful ways that our society benefits from mining coal, extracting natural gas and burning fossil fuels. If you were a student in Utah this year, you might be tempted to answer “True,” thanks to an Earth Day poster contest that’s being promoted […]
Posted inGoat
Good news for people who love bad news
In 2008, Canadian researchers made a scary prediction: In our warming world, boreal forests would stop absorbing excess carbon and start contributing to climate change as soon as 2020. What would cause this switch? The mountain pine beetles that have been eating their way though tens of millions of acres of alpine forests, leaving swaths […]
Posted inWotr
Maybe we should pay something for that open space
We take so many of the West’s open spaces for granted — the private ranches and agricultural lands that provide invaluable resources for us all – from clean air and water, wildlife habitat and crop pollination, to scenic vistas, hunting opportunities, and so much more. But landowners are rarely compensated for the far-reaching benefits they […]
Posted inMarch 18, 2013: Second annual travel issue
Volunteering provides a special experience in national parks
Note: This story is part of a special HCN magazine issue devoted to travel in the West. Big Bend National Park, Texas The Rio Grande is slow and muddy along the Mexican border, at the base of Santa Elena Canyon, on a sunny November day. My roommate, Alex Brachman –– like me, a fresh-out-of-college intern […]
Posted inGoat
Much ado about mud
Until recently, the phrase “flash flood” conjured in my mind a racing blue wall of water, or a canyon running red as blood with sediment – a deadly natural force that smells simply and cleanly of earth and rain. But a trip with friends down the San Juan River in southeastern Utah set me straight […]
Posted inWotr
What do you do when you meet a predator?
The March day in western Colorado was crystalline clear. North-facing mountain slopes held up to a foot of snow; the south faces, however, were bare. I made my way up a favorite isolated mountain valley along a stream of beaver ponds. I saw no beaver, but I did see a small mountain lion track. It’s […]
Posted inGoat
Sovereignty and the Skywalk
At the Grand Canyon Skywalk, tourists can pay about $90 to shuffle along a horseshoe of glass that extends over the rim’s edge, wearing special booties to avoid scratching the surface as they peer 4,000 vertical feet down at the Colorado River. For such a snazzy feat of engineering, you would expect an equally fancy […]